...
Second, I must be the only one who thinks the output generated by stat
packages
(including SPSS, SAS, Stata, LIMDEP, Systat, Gauss, Splus, etc.) is not
suitable
for reports, because I've never had any desire to copy output directly from
an
output window to a word processor to use as is. At best, copying from one
to
the other saves having to type the relevant information manually, but I
typically have to spend a great deal of time reformatting everything to make
it
pretty enough for my purposes. In fact, I find utilities such as -outreg-
infinitely better suited to this task. In fact, in an environment where
generating reams of tables is routine, the thought of copying and pasting
hundreds of tables is particularly off-putting. Like Marcella, I basically
favor linking the desired output to Excel/Word in such a way that the
formatting
is essentially automatic. I write programs to generate output files that I
load
into Excel (creating Stata data sets seems an unnecessary step), which makes
the
whole process faster than copy-paste-reformat, copy-paste-reformat, ....
Dave
For my two cents, several people have spoken about the better aesthetics of
SPSS output. Personally, I find it a bloated mess, and like dave rarely
expect to be able to copy useful output from a stats package into a useable
format for a report.
Also, someone mentioned desiring being able to form continuous interactions
without making new variables such as done in the anova command x*z. I'd
second that.
jeffrey
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